“Human beings are created and saved to be the children of God, sons and daughters of the Father in Christ the only Son, by the indwelling Holy Spirit.” (OCA Synod)
“In a world so consumed and fixated with worldly pleasures and riddled with secularism, it has become dangerously easy for the Christian to lose touch with his identity as a child of God and to forget who he is and why he lives. Each day we are bombarded by forces that smother the Spirit in us and attempt to strangle the life of Christ in us. This is a process that happens very subtly, without us hardly even noticing it…Perhaps the greatest danger to the Christian living in the world today is to allow that gradual process to take hold in his or her life, in which we gradually become less mindful of the things of the Spirit…” (Father Joshua Makoul)
“The word 'deny' might just be the most hated four letter word in our society… we are taught to deny ourselves of nothing…Our modern age encourages us to deny God and to focus solely on ourselves - for we are led to falsely believing that we are in charge - while Christ reverses this and tells us to deny ourselves and to focus solely on Him…We are to deny ourselves from our passions, temptations, and anything that will deter us from being close to God. To leave behind our selfish ways and to empty ourselves, so that God's will may abide in and work through us…it is God's will that truly fulfills our lives. To deny ourselves is not to lose our uniqueness as individuals, rather it is to reach our full potential as children of God.” (Father Andrew Georganas)
“God wants us to have emotional and spiritual riches…Emotional riches are acquired by learning to love your neighbor and by serving your neighbor with a servant’s heart. Spiritual riches come from loving God and recognizing that you are a child of God, who loves God as a Father, who trusts God as a child trusts his father.” (Fr. Stavros N. Akrotirianakis)
“There is nothing accidental in the life of an obedient child of God…Nothing can happen to a child of God outside the will of God.” (Paul Billheimer, Jill Briscoe)